Tilda

Tilda was just two months short of her 11th birthday when she first saw Brushwood Convent and Orphanage for Girls.

Following an accident that resulted in their house burning down, her father determines to make a better life for them both. He enlists in the South Australian Citizen Bushman Contingent and will soon be sent to South Africa to fight the Boers. 

To ensure Tilda is cared for, he takes her to the orphanage, where he gives her a parting gift—a leather notebook so that she can write the stories of her life and share it with him when they are reunited. He will do the same. 

More than a year passes, without any word from Tilda’s father. Life in the orphanage is difficult but her memories of her mother’s voice (who died of influenza when she was just two-years-old), her father’s promise that her time there is ‘temporary pain’ in exchange for better days ahead, and her lovely friend Annie Smith help her keep going. 

It didn’t take long for Tilda to realise that not all nuns are living according to their faith. In fact, some are downright mean. This is certainly the case with Sister Agatha, who for some reason seems to treat Tilda even worse than she does the other orphans. 

Thankfully Sister Geraldine is a 
shining light within the dark halls 
of Brushwood, and the only teacher there. She reads the girls poems by Emily Dickinson about hope. 

When Sister Agatha confronts Tilda with a letter she had secretly written to her father, in which she tells the truth about Agatha’s attitude and actions, Tilda can’t believe that one of the other girls has betrayed her. 

It triggers a showdown between Tilda and Sister Agatha, who insists that Tilda must publicly acknowledge that her father has abandoned her and she is really an orphan, not just a girl waiting for her father to come home. When Tilda refuses, she is locked in the boot room. The standoff continues for some time, with the punishments including hours spent scrubbing floors on her knees.

When Joshua the mailman’s son tells Annie that he remembers seeing letters addressed to Tilda, and had handed them to Sister Agatha, Tilda and Annie break into Agatha’s office to get the letters back. There, Tilda finds a document purportedly signed by her father, assigning custodianship of Tilda to the orphanage and giving up his rights. When Sister Agatha catches them, she locks them both in the boot room, which is a terrible experience for Annie who has a very weak chest. 

The following day, Tilda finally says what Agatha has been trying to force her to all this time. They are all shocked when Agatha announces that Tilda will be leaving them that same day. They don’t allow her to say goodbye to anyone—not even Annie—but bundle her off straight away in a cart driven by old Jock. He takes her to Norton Hall, the home of the orphanage’s key benefactor. Mr Norton is elderly and his hands twisted up with arthritis. Tilda will take care of his correspondence for him as Sister Agatha has recommended her most highly.

Tilda can’t understand why Sister Agatha has had such a turnaround after the antipathy she has always shown her. 

When Joshua arrives late one night with a note from Annie urging her immediate return, Tilda secretly leaves with him. Returning to the orphanage, she is horrified to find Annie is desperately ill. Her much loved friend tells her that she saw a man fitting her father’s description kneeling in the cemetery next door, weeping. 

Tilda breaks into Agatha’s office and inexplicably finds a date of death on her paperwork. She also looks again at the note her father supposedly wrote assigning her to the orphanage and realises that it is clearly a forgery. Why on earth would Sister Agatha do something so awful to both of them?

Through her own initiative and courage, Tilda is eventually reconciled with her father. When they confront Sister Agatha the truth comes out—she is Tilda’s aunt, and her heart is so full of bitterness towards the man who ‘took’ her beloved sister away from her (eg. he married her and a couple of years later she died of influenza), that she determined to take away from him the only thing he had left: his daughter. 

Four weeks later they returned to the orphanage, and it is a very different place. Agatha is gone. Sister Geraldine is in charge and she is a very different woman from Agatha. In fact, Tilda describes her as ‘kindness and grace wrapped in a bow.’

In the meantime, Tilda is working on forgiving Sister Agatha. She realised it wasn’t the Sister that broke her, it was the hatred in her heart that did it. It made her lose sight of what she KNEW to be true—her father loved her and would never leave her.

A lovely story inspired by the author’s grandmother Doris Gwendolyn Maas, who spent some of her childhood in an orphanage. The story itself is fictional. 

grief, loss, family, orphanage, friendship, writing, abandonment, hatred, reconciliation, forgiveness

Annie is obsessed with getting out of the orphanage, and thinks the only way that will happen is if she finds a husband. Consequently she is obsessed with Joshua Jones, the son of the postman. Tilda continually tells her she doesn’t need a boy, as Tilda’s father is certain to adopt her when he returns. Sadly Annie doesn’t survive her illness that was exacerbated by the cold night spent on the floor in the boot room, and passes away before Tilda can see her again.